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Payment deadline looms for Monaco's would-be builders



Previously-given municipal approvals for a major downtown project will expire next month unless the developer pays the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in required fees.

Proponents of the twin-tower Monaco project, which envisions nearly 300 suites and hotel rooms, aren't sure they'll come up with the cash before the April 23 deadline.

“It's a pretty tight timeframe for us,” Tyler Dueck of Premier Pacific Group, said Tuesday. “We're still intending to go forward with the project, but we're just plugging away on the financing and some engineering issues.”

City officials say they doubt the required payments, for parking-related issues and a landscaping performance bond, will be made by Premier Pacific. “I think we'd be surprised to see the project move ahead right now,” planner Ryan Smith said.

Council issued the development permit for the $100 million project in April 2013, on the developer's second-attempt to secure the necessary approvals. Plans for the Monaco show towers of 22 and 30 storeys at the corner of Doyle Avenue and St. Paul Street, directly north of where the new Interior Health centre is now under construction.

Plans also included four levels of retail and office space, as well as the downtown business core's first daycare. Originally projected to be finished in early 2016, the residential units were going to sell for between $300,00 and $500,000, the company said when council approved the project.

Councillors were excited about what they said was the Monaco's potential to convince hundred of Kelowna residents to move downtown.

“It's very consistent with where we're going as a city, which is to densify town centres and get more people living in downtown Kelowna, downtown Rutland, and the South Pandosy area,” then-mayor Walter Gray said.

If the required fees aren't paid by next month's deadline, the previously-given development permit would be taken off the city's books and it would be necessary for the company to begin the approval process all over again.

Dueck indicated the company would do so. “We'd have to put in another application, and we'd be interested in doing that. Nothing would change about the project from our end,” he said.

The company has not been shopping the site and its development approvals around to another builder, Dueck said.

He said the company believes there's enough demand in the Kelowna housing and real estate market to make the project viable. “We're quite happy with the market,” he said, adding many people have gone onto the company's website and registered themselves as prospective buyers of Monaco suites.

For now, the site is being used by dozens of downtown workers who are leaving their vehicles there all day in disregard of the No Parking signs.

Dueck said the Vancouver-based company is aware of the situation. But it hasn't entered into a site management contract with a parking contractor, he said, because it didn't want to see tickets being issued to people who work downtown and who may one day be interested in buying a suite in the Monaco.

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